FDev - Why the radio silence?

[ITZC0ATL]

I'm sure others will have noticed but FDev have been suspiciously silent on the forums - both Dangerous Discussion and in the 3.0 Beta Feedback forum. We have the odd dev making an off-topic comment, but really very little pertaining to the game itself.

I know they are probably extremely busy right now working on Beyond, but even in the beta forum they've made practically no posts or engaged with users. It's very hard to tell then if issues are being ackowledged, if they agree, or if they even care.

Now, I like Elite and I like FDev. However, I am a realist and we all know FDev can improve in certain areas. One of these key areas is communication.

With Dale gone and FDev really not present in the forum discussions at the moment, I'm worried they still haven't learned how to consistently communicate well with the community.

FDev - a little feedback would be nice. I don't need to know all the upcoming details and I don't need you to agree with me, but at the moment I feel as if player feedbck may as well be directed at the nearest brick wall for all the good it seems to be doing.


I will not be opening the pod bay doors until I get a dev response.

 

[Riverside]

After an all too brief flurry of activity a couple of weeks ago it does seem to have died down again yes.

Looking forward to finding out more about the premium content myself.

The beta forum has just been a mess with little directional feedback from the Devs, the massive & ultimately pointless argument over fine markups would have been avoided with earlier intervention for example.

 

[GraXXoR]

I would say that they're probably intently focussed on the Beta and nothing else, currently.
So they're probably lurking in the feedback threads rather than contributing anything new.

 

[Crank Larson]

Right.... So, they're currently running a beta (which has a forum for feedback), and have given us several livestreams showing off the new features. But that isn't enough. They must also be all over the forums responding to every query (most of which have been raised several times before)...

Personally, I hope they stay "silent" and keep on with actually programming the game.

 

[ITZC0ATL]

Right.... So, they're currently running a beta (which has a forum for feedback), and have given us several livestreams showing off the new features. But that isn't enough. They must also be all over the forums responding to every query (most of which have been raised several times before)...

Personally, I hope they stay "silent" and keep on with actually programming the game.

No, I fully appreciate they're busy and I wouldn't want to take up dev time responding to every individual complaint.

But, usually, they'll drop into threads where there's a lot of contention just to clarify if everyone has a misconception or make their stance known on an issue, or even ackowledge that they're aware of it.

The lack of even basic acknowledgement is what concerns me at the moment.

 

[Factabulous]

FD never say much here, can't say I've noticed them being quieter. This forum is for the community to discuss things - FD occasionally join in, but it's not supposed to be a conversation with them, but a conversation among ourselves.

 

[RagingxPenguin]

They've always been. They comment on some stuff but it's usually not even Elite related.


I feel there might be a bit of an internal struggle. I hope there isn't but. 3.0 has some large changes and people don't always agree.

 

[Henri]

they said they would be more engaged with the community from now on.
guess trying to come up with a low cost premium thingymajigg to keep
the life time expansion pass owners quiet is proving quite challenging.

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

Just a link

https://elitedevtracker.com/

Also CM and certain devs read forums. Responding is much harder than reading.

 

[MarkAusten]

I'm sure others will have noticed but FDev have been suspiciously silent on the forums - both Dangerous Discussion and in the 3.0 Beta Feedback forum (don't even start me on the lack of dev activity in the subforums). We have the odd dev making an off-topic comment, but really very little pertaining to the game itself.

I know they are probably extremely busy right now working on Beyond, but even in the beta forum they've made practically no posts or engaged with users. It's very hard to tell then if issues are being ackowledged, if they agree, or if they even care.

Now, I like Elite and I like FDev. However, I am a realist and we all know FDev can improve in certain areas. One of these key areas is communication.

With Dale gone and FDev really not present in the forum discussions at the moment, I'm worried they still haven't learned how to consistently communicate well with the community.

FDev - a little feedback would be nice. I don't need to know all the upcoming details and I don't need you to agree with me, but at the moment I feel as if player feedbck may as well be directed at the nearest brick wall for all the good it seems to be doing.


I will not be opening the pod bay doors until I get a dev response.

Situation normal. Move right along.

 

[IndigoWyrd]

I'm sure others will have noticed but FDev have been suspiciously silent on the forums - both Dangerous Discussion and in the 3.0 Beta Feedback forum (don't even start me on the lack of dev activity in the subforums). We have the odd dev making an off-topic comment, but really very little pertaining to the game itself.

I know they are probably extremely busy right now working on Beyond, but even in the beta forum they've made practically no posts or engaged with users. It's very hard to tell then if issues are being ackowledged, if they agree, or if they even care.

Now, I like Elite and I like FDev. However, I am a realist and we all know FDev can improve in certain areas. One of these key areas is communication.

With Dale gone and FDev really not present in the forum discussions at the moment, I'm worried they still haven't learned how to consistently communicate well with the community.

FDev - a little feedback would be nice. I don't need to know all the upcoming details and I don't need you to agree with me, but at the moment I feel as if player feedbck may as well be directed at the nearest brick wall for all the good it seems to be doing.


I will not be opening the pod bay doors until I get a dev response.

Maybe they just don't want to talk to you? ;-)

Maybe you should have done that thing for Dave.

I've had pretty good correspondence in the Beta forums - ok, granted, it's largely been by PM, but still... besides, you ever talk to a programmer? It's kind of like talking to paste, and I know and like quite a few programmers. They're just a quirky, odd lot, and that's OK. We need them that way to make things and make things work. Leave them be, and if they have something to say, they'll write it on a napkin and pass it along to someone else to relay.

Perhaps that's the problem - a shortage of napkins....

 

[Brett C]

According to the current/near real time forum stats, there's currently 30 Frontier Employees (or varying roles) viewing the forums. Especially the 3.0 feedback forum, 3.0 bug reports forum, suggestions forum and Dangerous Discussion. Most of them are taking in feedback from folks, fixing bugs, and so forth.

This doesn't always translate to them replying to threads that they're reading. They're quite busy this week into next week, and have been very busy since the turn of the new year.

 

[Riverside]

According to the current/near real time forum stats, there's currently 30 Frontier Employees (or varying roles) viewing the forums. Especially the 3.0 feedback forum, 3.0 bug reports forum, suggestions forum and Dangerous Discussion. Most of them are taking in feedback from folks, fixing bugs, and so forth.

This doesn't always translate to them replying to threads that they're reading. They're quite busy this week into next week, and have been very busy since the turn of the new year.

That's encouraging, thanks Brett. Where do I access this information?

 

[IndigoWyrd]

According to the current/near real time forum stats, there's currently 30 Frontier Employees (or varying roles) viewing the forums. Especially the 3.0 feedback forum, 3.0 bug reports forum, suggestions forum and Dangerous Discussion. Most of them are taking in feedback from folks, fixing bugs, and so forth.

This doesn't always translate to them replying to threads that they're reading. They're quite busy this week into next week, and have been very busy since the turn of the new year.

Ever since that Work-for-Tea program started, we haven't seen anything more than the tops of heads in months!

 

[Riverside]

Just a link

https://elitedevtracker.com/

Also CM and certain devs read forums. Responding is much harder than reading.

I have that page open almost constantly, although I disable the twitter part for the sake of my sanity.

 

[Brett C]

That's encouraging, thanks Brett. Where do I access this information?

Regarding who is and is not online? That's hidden from view except to forum administrators. It's a lot of data to render for how many people are on the forums, enabling it for all would look spammy, and would spike-up the server load considerably when you have thousands of folks hitting the page.

For reference on these forums right now...

There are currently 10427 users online. 1648 members and 8779 guests. Most users ever online was 14,404, Thu 25 January 2018 at 12:48 PM.

 

[Riverside]

Regarding who is and is not online? That's hidden from view except to forum administrators. It's a lot of data to render for how many people are on the forums, enabling it for all would look spammy, and would spike-up the server load considerably when you have thousands of folks hitting the page.

For reference on these forums right now...

Thanks Brett, I didn't think it was publicly available. Stats like you described are interesting, record stats particularly so. I'd love to see stuff like this (but for the game) on a regular basis.

Mostly (as I said in my initial reply) I'm interested to find out more about the premium content, although some sort of direction or feedback in the suggestions section for longer threads would be appreciated too.

This is my feedback.

 

[ITZC0ATL]

According to the current/near real time forum stats, there's currently 30 Frontier Employees (or varying roles) viewing the forums. Especially the 3.0 feedback forum, 3.0 bug reports forum, suggestions forum and Dangerous Discussion. Most of them are taking in feedback from folks, fixing bugs, and so forth.

This doesn't always translate to them replying to threads that they're reading. They're quite busy this week into next week, and have been very busy since the turn of the new year.

Hi Brett - thanks for taking the time to respond here. I can certainly imagine the team is very busy and it's looking like great work so far.

It does however look like a conscious decision was made by the developers not to get involved commenting on the beta forum, even if they are watching and reading.

For example, I created this thread to express concerns by myself and a portion of the exploration community about how the material limit caps would affect galactic-rim explorers. To date most players in the thread have expressed their support to us and hope that Frontier will provide a fix.

Now, today in the patch notes we noticed this:

Weapons & Modules

• Adjusted the Shock Cannon description to remove references to energy, as it is a Kinetic weapon
• Fixed E grade Shield Boosters having the wrong stats
• Rebalanced some module prices
  [*]Rebalanced some synthesis recipes

When checking the beta, the changes were not to any of the recipes discussed in the thread.

As I've said, I really like Elite, I think Frontier are great and I think Beyond is going to be great. But, as an explorer, it really feels like we're being ignored and I know others in the (exploration) community feel the same. We're on the 3rd beta now and it looks like we're not being taken into account - which is especially frustrating considering that the fix should be strictly a balancing one and not require extra coding. Just someone to review, hopefully agree there's a problem and adjust the synthesis recipes to match.

I don't mean to hijack this thread into an extension of that one, but the point I'm making is that the lack of communication has left a bad taste on an otherwise very positive update. As stated above, normally Frontier are good to at least pop in to the larger threads to clarify the official stance, but that hasn't been happening at all.

If you have your reasons, you have your reasons. But my honest feedback is that I've found this aspect of the beta process to be quite frustrating.

 

[Bryan K]

Thanks, Brett! It’s good to know you guys are reading all our feedback.

I sincerely hope you all get paid enough to sift through our drivel on a regular basis.

 

[UmbraRex]

In my limited experience, Dev Teams get quiet as betas close down and they push towards release.

Mainly because they are BUSY!